The coronavirus pandemic, which has struck the world since the beginning of 2020, in addition to the Palestinian Authority government’s measures, which some described as “ill-considered”, have resulted in the West Bank’s tourism sector receiving a heavy blow.

Omar Khweira, Director of Golden Tree Hotel in Nablus, said that about 38,000 Palestinian workers in the tourism and hospitality industry have lost their jobs because of the government’s improvised measures, including useless closures.

Khweira said that the government’s heedless measures have added insult to injury and killed many huge investments in the tourism sector.

In his interview with the Palestinian Information Center, Khweira demanded compensation for thousands of tourism workers who are among the hardest-hit by the crisis. 

Empty hotel rooms
Elias al-Arja, the head of the Arab Hotel Association in Bethlehem, said that in 2019 the occupancy rate was 70% in the hotels of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with an average of 17,000 guests per night.

Al-Arja told the Palestinian Information Center’s reporter that the year 2020 had a promising start with an unprecedented number of hotel reservations, noting that the occupancy rate was expected to exceed 80%.

He added that there are 11,000 hotel rooms in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the average occupancy of which was 8,000. Now, he said, they are all empty, and the losses are estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars.

Heavy losses
Al-Arja said that the losses are not limited to the hotel sector, but they include all tourism-related businesses, including restaurants, gift shops, parks, places of entertainment, tourism companies, reservation offices, and others.

Amer Awwad, who runs a park in Jericho, told the Palestinian Information Center’s reporter that the government, while resuming work in most sectors, is still closing the facilities associated with tourism.

Some of them are operating under unjustified restrictions, and restaurants were the last facilities to open, Awwad added.

He pointed out that he sees no problems in hotels, restaurants, and parks re-opening with certain safety measures taken into consideration, saying that he does not understand the government’s policy which seems to be improvised.

Awwad warned that the tourism sector is dramatically collapsing, especially that many investors have built their projects on bank loans and certain expectations of work and occupancy.

He explained that it is not a matter of decline but a complete collapse.

Half-baked measures
Awwad criticized the government’s ill-considered measures. “At first all restrictions were acceptable, but what we see today shows that the government has not been successful in managing the crisis,” he said.

He stressed that the government, instead of imposing unnecessary restrictions on parks and restaurants, should shift attention towards the thousands of Palestinians who enter and leave the West Bank through random holes and gates in the separation wall without being checked or quarantined.

 

Source: The Palestinian Information Center